The following is taken from Charles Pellegrino's Unearthing Atlantis (pages 233-246). This is a story of how science works toward discovery. It is the story of why we can believe that the destruction at Thera probably occurred in 1628 B.C. This is a fascinating story, but read it as a lesson of how historical science works.
From Thera itself came carbonized tree
trunks, still rooted in Minoan soil at the bottom of the Fira quarry. The
cleat trees have provided us with a dock through archaeological time. Carbon-14
is produced by neutrons from the sun showering down through the atmosphere.
These collide with abundant nitrogen nuclei in the air we breathe, chipping
off a positively charged proton and replacing it with an uncharged neutron
of approximately the same mass. The nitrogen is thus transformed into a
heavier, unstable (that is, radioactive) variety of the carbon atom. It
achieves stability by decaying back into normal nitrogen again.
Meanwhile (this does get complicated), plants and animals are unable to differentiate between the unstable carbon-14 atom and the normal carbon-12 atom, and utilize both with equal ease. Death ends this process; an organism's carbon-12 remains, but the carbon-14 changes back into ordinary nitrogen at a predictable rate: one half will disappear every 5730 years. The Theran tree trunks could thus provide a date for the burial of Minoan settlements. If, for example, the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 suggested that exactly half of the carbon-14 had been lost, the trees would then have died around 1760 B.C.
The carbon-14 verdict from the Fira quarry trees was that life on the island had ended in the seventeenth century B.C. - about 1640, give or take thirty years in either direction.
The conventional date, derived from the pottery clock, placed the LM1B period and the burial of Minoan Thera about 1450-1500 B.C.
Could the pottery chronology be off by almost two centuries? Marinatos didn't think so. He decided that the paleontologists and the nuclear physicists were mistaken. He wouldn't believe it. To this day, many archaeologists don't believe it. They are sticking to their guns on the pottery chronology, insisting that we paleontologist-types are full of hot air, that our way of dating things must be in error.
Personally, I don't understand what all the fuss is about. The pottery dates were from the very start arbitrary, based on an (itself arbitrary) estimate that fifty years had passed between each new pottery style. Dozens of different styles were then stacked on top of each other to derive dates. Unfortunately, the dates began to enter textbooks, and each new class of archaeology students was required to memorize them. From that moment they became self- perpetuating dogma. When some of those students became practicing archaeologists, there arose a tendency to view the dates as immutable fact. Encountering a discrepancy of one or two centuries was intolerable to them.
If Thera is the world's greatest whodunit (rivaled only by the dinosaur disappearing act), then these past four years have seen a furious accumulation of new clues. From paleobotanists in California and Ireland have come what, to me at least, are the most accurate and telling dates, all the more convincing because they fall within the carbon-14 range that Spyridon Marinatos found so distasteful. The bristlecone pines of California's White Mountains are known to live for five thousand years. You can count each year by the seasonal fluctuations of growth, which are laid down within the trees as annual growth ringsthe feature that gives wood its grain. If you count back to the year A.D. 1816, you will find that the growth ring is heavily peppered with unusual, darkened cells, created by ice scarring during the summer season. This was Tambora's false winter, an event known from American, European and Asian records as the year without a summer. An identical frost scar appears in the 1627 B.C. growth banda year whose summer snows could be attributed to none other than the eruption of Thera. Confirmation comes from an exhaustive study of overlapping generations of oak trees preserved in Irish peat bogs. Every century's pattern of dry and wet and somewhere-in-between summers is like a spectral signature written in fluctuating growth-ring sizes. Careful comparison allows the construction of an unbroken record of seasonal variation reaching all the way back to the last Ice Age. All trees dating from the seventeenth century B.C. display abnormally narrow growth rings sometime in the 1620s, suggesting that there were summer seasons, during that decade, too cold to support normal growth.
From the Greenland ice sheet, in layers of ice that accumulate annually, much like the tree rings, University of Copenhagen glaciologist Claus Hammer has extracted an ice layer containing traces of an acidic snowfall. It is more than three thousand years old, and though similar acid signals in the uppermost layers of snow and ice can be identified as fallout from the carbon exhaust cloud that now shrouds the earth, in the seventeenth century B.C., volcanoes were the only source of acid snow. Hammer acknowledges that ice-layer dates cannot be counted back as easily or precisely as California bristlecone rings. Keeping this limitation in mind, he places the acid snow at 1644 B.C., give or take twenty years. The age uncertainty (1624-1664 B.C.) is large enough to encompass the Irish peat-bog event (1620- 1629 B.C.), the California bristlecone scars (1627 B.C.) and the carbon-14 date (1610 - 1670 B.C.).
So, we are probably looking at a final explosion in the autumn of 1628 B.C. Atmospheric dust then circled the globe, created a false winter during the summer of 1627 B.C. and eventually fell to earth as acid snow. If Marinatos's five-year gap between LM1A and LM1B is assumed to be true, then the buried city of Thera was abandoned in 1633 B.C., give about ten years or take two.
Christos Doumas has expressed reservations about taking scientific dating as gospel. He protests that we must consider the possibility that acid snow and the global chill of 1627 B. C. did not come from Thera at all, but from some other volcano.
Deep-sea research refutes this theory. Research vessels have collected bottom samples from the seven seas, and across the lengths and widths of the four oceans. Volcanic explosions of the magnitude required to create false winters distribute detectable ash layers over thousands of miles of seabed, yet no other candidate for the 1627 B.C. freeze has turned up.. The California bristlecones record only two other frost-ring events during the first three millenia B.C., and both are easily identifiable in ocean sediments. The first freeze seems to be linked with the 1900 B.C. explosion of Mount St. Helens, only a few hundred miles north of the trees. The second frost-ring event follows, by a year or less, the 44 B.C. eruption of Mount Etna, and also coincides with an acid signature in Greenland ice dating to about 50 B.C. (give or take twenty years).
One other piece of the jigsaw puzzle, only recently brought to light, provides a glimpse of life under the pall of volcanic winter, and can be dated with reasonable assurance to the time of the Thera upheaval.
In China, during the Minoan Linear A Period, records were written on strips of bamboo. Fourteen hundred years later, all such strips that had survived to the reign of Emperor Qin were recognized as priceless treasures and, probably under orders from the emperor himself, were compiled and copied by scribescopied so many times that survival of China's past into its future was virtually guaranteed. The ancient texts state that "in the twentyninth year of King Chieh [the last ruler of Hsia, the earliest recorded Chinese dynasty], the Sun was dimmed . . . King Chieh lacked virtue . . . the Sun was distressed . . . during the last years of Chieh ice formed in [summer] mornings and frosts in the sixth month [July]. Heavy rainfall toppled temples and buildings.... Heaven gave severe orders. The Sun and Moon were untimely. Hot and cold weather arrived in disorder. The five cereal crops withered and died."
The bamboo annals further record that floods and ice were followed by seven years of drought lasting into the beginning of the Shang dynasty. A great famine broke out, and in the northern provinces man became a maneater.. The Chinese scribes did not provide precise dates for these events; but they did footnote their royal genealogies with listings of eclipses and other astronomical phenomena. During 1990 and 1991, NASA/JPL astronomer Kevin Pang carefully tracked China's dynasties backward through time, using as probes the predictable motions of heavenly bodies to derive such precisely dated events as the lunar eclipse of January 29, 1137 B.C.which, though not dated by the scribes, was said by them to have occurred during the thirty- fifth year of King Wen.
King Chei lived at the same time as T'ang (the first king of the Shang dynasty), which, according to the scribes, was sixteen generations before King Wen. Because the Chinese considered a generation to be thirty years long, one can infer that Chieh ruled about 480 years before Wenaround 1617 B.C., plus or minus a decade or two. Armed with additional eclipse dates for 1876 B.C. (twenty - five generations before Wen) and 1302 B.C. (five generations before Wen), Kevin Pang plotted the eclipses on a graph, fitting a curve through them and locating the point that, according to Chinese history, places Chieh sixteen generations before Wen.
"We find the date is again [in the range of] 1600 B.C.," says Pang, "plus or minus thirty years. Thus the historical records confirm what was suggested by the ice cores, tree rings and older radiocarbon datesthat Thera [exploded] late in the seventeenth century B. C. "
Given such evidence, I think the archaeologists will eventually come around. One thing is certain: these are exciting times for astronomers, glaciologists and paleontologists to be poking our noses into the field. Resetting dates tends to ruffle a few feathers, but Cretan and Theran scholars haven't put up any serious resistance. People have not been studying the Minoans for very long: the civilization was only discovered during the past century, and there has not been enough time for opinions to become deeply entrenched.
Ancient Egypt is quite a different matter. Egyptologists have been studying temples and tombs for generations and generations, and so intensely specialized are they, often dedicating their lives to a single pharonic dynasty, that geologic time may lose its meaning to them. The only archaeologists I have encountered who sometimes have difficulty believing that the earth is more than sixty thousand years old have been Egyptologists. Suffice it to say that one Egyptian scholar became so disturbed by news that some of his pottery dates may have to be rewritten that he began to confide in me some chillingly detailed suicide fantasies. Since I was depending on this man to get me out of the desert alive, I decided not to press the issue. As far as I can recall, he is the only person ever to have succeeded in shutting me up.
Oceanographer Daniel Stanley has some exciting new insights on paleontology and the pottery-clock discrepancy. He and Harrison Cheng, both of the Smithsonian Institution, discovered a Nile Delta ash layer and have identified its chemical fingerprint as an exact match with ash from Thera. Equally important: the ash dates within the same ballpark as the California bristlecones, the Irish bog trees, the Greenland acid layer, China's summer frosts and Theran carbon. Of course, one cannot date the ash itself. The argon isotopes native to the ash decay so slowly that changes are discernible only across scales of tens of millions of years. We have to rely on the more rapid decay rate of carbon-14, which you don't find in the ash layer. But there is dead organic matter in the mud upon which the layer fell, and in the mud that was later deposited on top of it.
"So we have the ash layer bracketed
by radiocarbon dates," explains Stanley. "The mud tells us that
the ash fell around thirtyfive hundred years ago. If you consider that worms
and other organisms were drilling up and down through the layers, stirring
up the rotting leaves and reeds we are reading from, then our age uncertainties
must allow for a hundred years or more in either direction. Mud is nowhere
near as accurate as a California pine, but I think we're in the same time
frame as the pine-tree freeze, within the errors of C-14."
"And the Exodus connection?" I asked.
"That's of course the interesting thing. I mean, what else can you say? Hail mixed with flames? A darkness so thick that people could not see one another? A pillar of fire lighting the night sky? The Bible makes reference to all of these things, and all of these things could be descriptions of the ash cloud. This Nile ash layer is the first hard proof of anything like that in Egypt. We now have a record that statements given in Exodus which sound very strange most likely did happen. Something happened . . . at about the right time, I suppose, for some archaeologists. And others, who have their minds made up on one pharaoh or another being the pharaoh of the Exodus" Stanley broke into laughter. "Well, they may not like it, but finally we've fixed a hard date on it There it is."
Now, who was ruling Egypt around 1628 B.C. ? That's a tricky one, "a sticky wicket," as Stanley puts it.
We have to begin by forgetting everything the Egyptologists "know" about dates derived from the often disputed (within circles of Egyptologists) comparison of art designs with Egyptian pharaonic dates (also hotly debated).
Next, we look for traces of Egypt in the Minoan world, starting at Thera, where some of the walls are decorated with a rare, copper-calcium-silicate pigment called Egyptian bluewhich was developed and produced on the Nile and undoubtedly exported to Thera and Crete. But the blue pigment tells us only that contact with Egypt had been established at some time before the coming of the ash layer. Our first real clue as to whose dynasty we can place near this layer comes from Crete.
After the appearance of LM1B pottery and the partial rebuilding of the palace at Knossos, one administrator or another built himself a tomb on the outskirts of the capital. When he died, the tomb was filled with objects from his life, including clay tablets covered with the early Greek, Linear B script, examples of marine style pottery and an alabaster vessel imported from Egypt and inscribed with the name of Tuthmosis III, who ruled for a time in a co-regency with Queen Hatshepsut, history's first woman pharaoh.
Queen Hatshepsut was said to have been a divinely born savior.. For approximately twenty years she maintained majority control over her stepson, Tuthmosis III, apparently concentrating on the peaceful aspects of rule rather than expanding the empire into neighboring territories. Her stepson eventually succeeded her, and one of his first motions was to have the face of her golden death mask chiseled away from every layer of her sarcophagus (which was composed of several body-shaped boxes fitting one within the otherone of which survives, in part, in the Cairo museum). He then declared the rule of a female Horus blasphemous, and ordered almost every trace of Hatshepsut's reign destroyed. Next, he expanded the empire, making war with his neighbors and leading at least one military campaign into Canaan, the Promised Land.
If a man named Moses really did exist at the time of the ash layer, then Hatshepsut was not the only royal blasphemer against Egyptian traditions. The Bible itself tells us that Moses had connections (possibly blood ties) with the pharaonic family. We can speculate endlessly about the similarity between the names Moses and Tuthmosis (was the former a derivative of the latter?); but at this writing we can do little more than hypothesize except for one thing that I find particularly interesting. It is significant that within a century of Tuthmosis III's reign, the heretic pharaoh Amenophis IV (also called Akhenaton) made official the belief in one god, one creator. His successor, the boy-king Tutankhamen, quickly put an end to that particular line of thought. The years surrounding the ash layer were evidently ripe for heresy.
Meanwhile, back to the business of tossing out the old calendars, and calibrating time all over again, beginning at the formation of the Theran ash layer in the autumn of 1628 B.C. In the tomb of Semut, architect and vizier to Queen Hatshepsut, one wall is a fresco of men carrying Late Minoan 1A pottery vases. The men in the procession are wearing kilts identical to those worn by men at the helms of ships painted on a wall of Thera's West House. The implication is that the Semut fresco was completed during Crete's LM1A period, before Thera exploded. Therefore, at least some portion of Hatshepsut's reign must have preceded the ash layer.
Men wearing Minoan clothes are next depicted in the tomb of User Amon, a vizier to Tuthmosis III about twenty years after the death of Semut. One of the Minoans is carrying a rhyton (an omamented scoop) shaped into a bull's head. A ceramic scoop very much like this has been recovered from the ruins of Thera. An inscription in the Egyptian tomb refers to "gifts from the islands of the Great Green." It seems likely that the vizier sailed personally to at least one of the islands, as the ruins of Knossos bear a broken statue inscribed, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, with User's name.
A third, and later, procession fresco is the most important one. It is located in the Karnak tomb of Rekhmire, one of the last viziers to Tuthmosis III. An inscription identifies the fourteen men shown in the painting as visitors from Keftiu. Most of them are carrying pottery vases painted in the LM1A style, but one man holds an LM1B rhyton, indicating that Marinatos's pottery transition has taken place.
The pottery is not all that has changed. The Rekhmire figures were originally painted wearing the short, simply patterned kilts seen in the Semut, User and West House frescoes. We know from a newer, second layer of paint (which has partly flaked away from its undercoat) that someone repainted the figures to show longer, more elaborately decorated kilts identical to those worn by men painted on pottery vessels from mainland Greece, and also on the palace walls of post-Theran Knossos.
Now large pieces of the puzzle are fitting togetherfitting almost too well. The Rekhmire fresco records the transition we are looking for and allows us to place the ash layer in the reign of Tuthmosis III. The fresco tells us one more thing: whatever the consequences of the Thera explosion, it did not sever trade between Crete and Egypt. Within a single generation, between the year Rekhmire ordered the construction of his tomb and the year it was sealed with him in it, Thera exploded, the LM1B style emerged, and Cretan Minoans became subservient to mainland Greeks. Shipping might have been temporarily interrupted, but within a decade or two, people who looked Minoan, yet wore kilts that were not quite Minoan, began arriving in Egypt.
This interpretation of the Rekhmire fresco is by no means original to me, though I ally myself fully with it. Credit for the connection belongs to Trinity College historians J. V. Luce and F. Schachermeyer.
"Rekhmire, as vizier, had the duty of receiving vassal princes and their offerings," explains Luce. "He could be regarded as Egypt's foreign minister. The change in his tomb decoration can hardly be discounted as a mere artistic whim. It must surely have had political significance. By ordering kilts to be painted over, Rekhmire was giving diplomatic recognition to a change of regime at Knossos."
The Egyptian pottery clock puts the Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III coregency between 1500 and 1450 B.C. The clock exists, but is it keeping the right time?
Apparently not.
The ash layer, dated to 1628 B.C., runs through the Tuthmosis III period and reveals the old dating methods to be in error by about one hundred fifty years.
The transition of Cretan kilt styles from Minoan to mainland Greek appears to have occurred near the end of Tuthmosis III's reign. History tells us that his predecessor, Queen Hatshepsut, focused her attention inward, on Egypt itselfwhich is consistent with her new role as a pharaoh of the oppression. Tuthmosis III would thus appear to be the pharaoh of the Exodus, one of the first and most famous migrations of Hebrews Out of Egypt. What is most interesting about the connection between the ash layer and Tuthmosis III is that monotheism, a central theme of Hebrew belief, would soon be adopted by one of Tuthmosis III's successors. Something very important, yet poorly understood, was happening in Egypt during the aftermath of the Exodus. I suspect that the volcanic phenomena associated with Moses' departure left a bigger impression than most people think.
History also tells us that Tuthmosis III led armies between the Bitter Lakes into Canaan. This is consistent with biblical descriptions of the pharaoh's unsuccessful pursuit of Moses.
But the parting of the Red Sea and the destruction of the pharaoh's army by its unparting, that cannot be explained by Thera, maintains Christos Doumas. "Tidal waves from the Mediterranean could never have affected the Red Sea, but many scholars have suggested that the Hebrew words jam suf should be translated'Sea of Reeds' instead of 'Red Sea.' " Professor Galanopoulos of the Athens Institute of Seismology, who has associated the volcanic eruption with the legendary flood of Deucalion in Minoan times, and the landing of a boatload of lucky survivors on Mount Parnassus, suggests that this 'Sea of Reeds' can probably be identified with Sirbonis Lake, one member of the string of so-called 'Bitter Lakes' to the east of the Nile's right branch.
Doumas adds, "The route of the Exodus, as described in the Bible, favors such an interpretation, which also sounds more logical [than running headlong into the Red Sea, only a few miles south of the Bitter Lakes.]."
Egyptologists have pointed out that rates of evaporation and refill can vary considerably on the Bitter Lakes, producing great fluctuations of water level, making it possible for people to cross in some places at certain times.
If Doumas is correct about the Exodus route, then the route itself is shrouded in odd coincidence. During the Six-Day War of A.D. 1967, an Israeli general crossed from the opposite direction. He drove his tanks over the red sands between the Bitter Lakes to penetrate and capture the Second and Third Egyptian Armies.
When Thera exploded, it changed the history of the world. If we want to understand the catastrophe, and its cascade of consequences, we cannot limit ourselves to one small branch of archaeological research. To make sense of the puzzle, we have to look at what everyone else has been seeing, in such seemingly unrelated fields as glaciology, paleobotany, oceanography, particle physics, chemistry, classical literature, atmospheric science and ancient ship- building techniqueswith a little theology thrown in. And if we really pay attention, we may occasionally think what no one has thought before.
History was always my worst subject back in high school. I found it one hundred percent boring. I wish someone had thought of beginning a history course with archaeology and the search for lost civilizations. No history teacher ever told me that history could be this interesting.
FURTHER READINGS